In an interview with PharmaShots, Andrea DiFabio, JD, Chief Legal and Administration Officer of Repertoire Immune Medicines shares her views on the importance of $189M series B funding and how it will support the company’s pipeline and manufacturing plans.
Shots:
- The company reported the completion of a $189 million Series B financing. Founded by Flagship Pioneering, Repertoire has raised more than $350 million in the aggregate to date
- The funding will support the expansion of the company’s DECODE discovery platform, accelerate its clinical and preclinical pipeline, expand Repertoire’s team, and enhance its manufacturing capabilities
- The company’s first novel product, PRIME IL-15 (RPTR-147) is a multi-clonal T cell therapy consisting of naïve, rare T cells derived from the peripheral blood, activated against a curated set of antigens, and armed with our proprietary cytokine payload
Tuba: Discuss the importance of $189M series B funding.
Andrea: Repertoire’s Series B raise is a financial milestone that will power the company to leadership in cellular immunity through multiple stages of platform discovery and drug development.This milestone enables us to further invest in our platform technology and advance our efforts which focus on the massive market opportunity of cellular immunity. The financing will also support the advancement of multiple programs in immuno-oncology, which are novel first-in-kind immune medicines, that are already in the clinic. Through the use of our platforms, we will be able to discover new treatments for multiple therapeutic areas and patient populations.
Tuba: Who are the different investors involved in the funding?
Andrea: As stated in our press release, joining Flagship Pioneering, Repertoire’s institutional founder and principal backer, are new and existing investors including Softbank Vision Fund 2i, the Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP Investments), the Alaska Permanent Fund, Invus, and others.
Tuba: How this funding will support the company’s pipeline and manufacturing plans?
Andrea: The financing will support the advancement of multiple programs in immuno-oncology, which are novel first-in-kind immune medicines already in the clinic and will allow us to further discover the novel antigen-TCR pairs for multiple diseases that are mediated through cellular immunity.
Tuba: How will the funding help the company to expand its DECODE platform?
Andrea: We have spent the last few years developing the most sophisticated platform in the field of cellular immunity, which allows us to decipher the entire immune synapse – the relationship between T cells, their receptors, and the antigens they see in the body. Insights from DECODE allows us to identify validated targets in humans, which we can use to develop novel immune medicines for cancer, autoimmune disorders, infectious disease, and other serious diseases.
Tuba: Share the details of DEPLOY and the DECODE platform with our readers.
Andrea: Repertoire’s DECODE platform and our DEPLOY development engine, working together, enable us to create targeted immune medicines. Our DECODE platform discovers disease-causing antigens, as well as the T cells that recognize those antigens. Our integrated suite of technologies allows us to paint a full picture of the immune synapse to analyze how TCRs recognize their respective and unique antigens, learning which T cells see which antigens in an individual’s MHC. Rather than relying on predictive epitopes, we use experimental systems to find real epitopes that bind to TCRs. We detect TCR-antigen pairs that interact and have a unique function. We determine the functional importance of T cells that recognize those unique peptides. DECODE also enables us to conduct clinical trials in a different, more efficient manner. We create the right clonotype-specific product for the right group of patients and then verify that our product is getting to diseased tissue; this enables small, efficient proof-of-biology human trials.
Our DEPLOY development engine is the way in which Repertoire uses the discoveries made from our DECODE platform from human disease tissue to develop treatments based on our knowledge of the immune synapse. It allows us to use a highly curated antigen repertoire to create targeted immune medicines that harness the power of highly specific T cells and direct them against specific antigens in the context of the disease areas we are pursuing. Our scientists have spent years developing technology to collect T cells and antigen-presenting cells from a patient’s peripheral blood, and then to use those codes to activate (prime) T cells against particularly cancer antigens. The activated T cells then are amplified many folds to create a novel immune medicine which we call our PRIME multiclonal T cell product.
Our scientists have developed a novel set of technologies for attaching potent immunomodulators to T cells. In this way, we are able to deliver potent cytokines like IL-15 or IL-12 directly to tumors by using the natural homing power of the T cells to traffic to diseased tissue. Our platform also may make it possible to combine PRIME IL-15 and PRIME IL-12.
The depth and breadth of our technology, unique in the field, allows us to design superior immune medicines.
Tuba: Can we have a glance at the company’s portfolio?
Andrea: We are creating a new category of immune medicines enabled from our DECODE discovery platform. Our first novel product in the clinic, PRIME IL-15 (RPTR-147), is a multi-clonal T cell therapy consisting of naïve, rare T cells derived from the peripheral blood, activated against a curated set of antigens and armed with our proprietary cytokine payload.
Tuba: Is the company open for collaborations and investors? If yes, how one can get in touch with you?
Andrea: We welcome collaborations to leverage our DECODE platform to discover novel antigens and T cells in diseased tissues. Today, we have established collaborations with leading academic and clinical institutions in the areas of cancer, autoimmunity, infectious disease, and other serious disease areas.
Tuba: Share the company’s plan (new collaborations, product advancement, upcoming announcements) with our subscribers.
Andrea: Recently, we announced collaborations with Yale University in multiple sclerosis and melanoma as well as Dana Farber Cancer Institute in HPV+ head and neck cancers. We also announced the FDA acceptance of the IND for PRIME IL-12, an autologous multi-targeted T cell candidate for HPV+ solid tumors. We expect to initiate a Phase 1/2 trial to characterize the safety, tolerability, and proof of biological activity of PRIME IL-12 in patients with relapsed/refractory HPV+ tumors and advanced metastatic melanoma mid-year. We also are publishing the results of our original research on the use of the DECODE platform in multiple fields, including oncology and COVID-19.
Main Image Source: University of California San Francisco
About Andrea DiFabio:
Andrea DiFabio is the Chief Legal and Administration Officer of Repertoire Immune Medicines. She earned a JD from Northeastern University School of Law and a BA from Boston University, where she also participated in the Executive “Mini-MBA” Program
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